


Until my darkness goes.

by reygrets



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Imagery, Dark Rey, Dathomir, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Lightning, Gratuitous ancient sith imagery, Korriban, Master and Apprentice, Slow Burn, sith apprentice Rey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-06 12:29:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reygrets/pseuds/reygrets
Summary: “What do you think they want?” Rey speaks, hushed as if the willowy hwotha berry or stout greybush that lined the pathway back up the foothills were listening in. Qi’ra’s sigh to follow speaks to the life she’s lead, prepared for the world to fall apart at any moment.She stops, well out of earshot of the Zabrak that then disappears behind rotted pillars and worn Qorsisajak inscriptions, and turns to look at Rey. Weary eyes rove over the young apprentice’s face, and Rey could almost cry from the fondness she finds when a weathered hand lifts her chin, gaze held in silence as the wind kicks up russet sand, they're shielded only by the Snowbark tree, looming like a patron of the temple behind it.“What all Empire’s want sweet girl,” Qi’ra’s voice breaks, cheeks hollow when she goes to steady herself with a penetrative breath, “To conquer whatever and whoever aren’t already theirs to control.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Titled after The Rolling Stone's song: Paint it black (I highly suggest listening to it while reading this chapter; I'll eventually make a playlist to accompany the fic as a whole, and separate the songs by the content they're relevant to).

Each sharp intake of breath fills Rey’s lungs with the sting of ozone and the crackle of tension, thick enough between herself and her Master that the sparring felt slow. Belabored by the exhaustion from hours of training beforehand and the humidity that singes the twin red blades of her saber, enough for intermittent puffs of steam to rise. The glow of their weapons is the only light they go by now, the sun hidden by phosphorus and sulfur clouds; Maul would not stop, day or night, they’d continue on until Rey drops to one knee and begs of him, his mercy.

Today is different. Lightning, painted orange by the eerie tapestry of the dusky sky, forks brilliantly and thunder rattles the ground beneath their feet. Rey can feel it, it feeds the living force with static and sets her on edge.

_Something is coming_; it has both of them pacing neatly across the flatlands where they routinely train. Maul bares his teeth at the sky, unbothered by the threat of a storm and gives his saber a flourish to draw Rey’s focus back to him. She inclines her head in an approximation of a bow and sets back into a defensive stance; staff held parallel to her body so that one blade shone directly in front of her face and its twin burns a stain into the greyed stone at her heel.

He approaches cautiously, in a choreographed sequence so that Rey would both learn the follow-through to repeat it when it is her turn to go on the offensive, and how to defend against it now.

Maul’s a skilled teacher, even if not a patient one; his desire to see her succeed under the cruel thumb of Sith tutelage wars with the man who had known her since she was knee-high and terrified of being left alone. The girl before him now is a woman forged in the fires of adversity and hardened like an unholy diamond from the pressure and rigor of her training. And so he would fight her not as a child, but as his near equal.

He brought his saber down over her head and Rey blocks it with a split second twist of her forearm, the other edge of her own saber nearly catching him in the knee but Maul is lithe, and his robotic limbs give him the upper hand insofar as flexibility, and speed. It draws a surprised noise from her and Rey has to throw herself to the slate floor in order to avoid the singe of him swinging his staff around to complete the arc of the initial attack.

“Slow.” He chides, but there’s no heat behind it. If anything, Maul’s the one who is beginning to sound worn, whereas Rey’s cheeks burn from exertion but her muscles hum happily, power still pulsing through her in waves.

Rey chuckles when he reaches out his hand to pull her up, she claps it with her own, firm, and rises to stand. Dusting ash and soot from her dark robes in the intermediary, it’s nearly invisible, the marks left by her fall but they are nonetheless irritating, and the young apprentice is nothing if not meticulous

“Again,” she insists, and Maul responds with a sage nod and by falling back into step -- Rey would get this right eventually, she’s sure of it.

Before they can resume, Qi’ra’s voice echoes off the sheer cliffs behind them; and both force sensitives turn to look towards her, a mirror image that makes her smile wide (the lines on her aging face tell Rey that she hasn’t smiled nearly enough in her life), and she waves for them to continue. The older woman takes her seat on a smooth outcropping -- worn from a hundred other days, just like this -- and watches as Rey reignites her saber.

Her posture is ramrod, the careful footwork, one behind the other as Rey faces him, walking in a semicircle around Maul, the world fading to a monochromatic blur behind her. Nothing exists that is not this: the steady rise and fall of her chest as she measures her breathing, the creak of her knuckles as she tightens her grip on the hilt of her saberstaff, and the way their eyes lock-- Master and apprentice -- across the training ground.

It’s nearly a dance in its complexity but as routine as the setting sun; two predators posturing -- the flash of her Master’s serrated teeth, and her own exposed as full lips split into an incredibly telling grin. This, while necessary to ensure Rey would blossom as a Sith all her own, still wrought joy.

Some families go to core worlds and play on beaches, theirs sparred until the callouses on her palms split and bled.

“Tired yet?” Rey goads, and the Zabrak throws back his head, vestigial horns catching the last dregs of the golden sunset when a laugh of all things works its way up his throat. She can’t recall ever having heard him laugh before, so it’s enough to catch Rey off guard. Maul isn’t one to miss an opening -- shifting forward, he lunges and the end of his saber catches her in the shoulder, knocking Rey flat on her ass.

This time, he doesn’t help her up, and the flash of his mangled smile is a warning.

She has to do better. She must.

Qi’ra’s gone to say something - a snide comment that’d distract Maul long enough for Rey to regain her footing - when the sky darkens further, unnaturally. This is not the work of oncoming night but the dreadnought that crawls out of hyperspace and leaves the world around them in a mottled, patchwork of shadow. 

Rey’s heart is hammering in her chest; not out of fear, but the thrill of a battle promised.

She might be an apprentice, but she knows that she’s a force all her own, ready and raring to deal damage to whatever fool battalion thought it best to attack a planet inhabited solely by ancient Sith and powerful enemies to any and all who’d threaten their home.

Nobody moves for a solid few moments; all staring on in awe (and perhaps in fear -- though no present parties would ever admit to such a weakness). Maul’s the first to react, extinguishing his saber and marching back towards the refurbished Sith temple that now serves as their house.

It takes Rey twice as long to shake off the paralytic that is the unknown looming ominously above them; saberstaff clipped to the wrap-around holster on her thigh. Qi’ra joins her, of course, not a minute later; her hand warm to the small of Rey’s back in a familiar and comforting gesture.

“What do you think they want?” Rey speaks, hushed as if the willowy hwotha berry or stout greybush that line the pathway back up the foothills were listening in. Qi’ra’s sigh to follow speaks to the life she’s lead, prepared for the world to fall apart at any moment.

She stops, well out of earshot of the Zabrak that then disappears behind rotting pillars and worn Qorsisajak inscriptions, and turns to look at Rey. Weary eyes rove over the young apprentice’s face, and Rey can almost cry from the fondness she finds when a weathered hand lifts her chin, gaze held in silence as the wind kicks up russet sand, they stand shielded only by the Snowbark tree, looming like a patron of the temple behind it.

“What all Empire’s want sweet girl,” Qi’ra’s voice breaks, cheeks hollow when she goes to steady herself with a penetrative breath, “To conquer whatever and whoever aren’t already theirs to control.”

There’s a heft to the force now, something that hadn’t previously woven itself into the complicated tapestry of all living things here -- Rey senses it, weak from afar but it’s familiar in the way a lost dream is when it comes back in pieces. It leaves her unsettled yet without a way to communicate the pit of dread forming low, heavy like a stone in her gut.

“They’ll die if they come here. We’ll make sure of it.” Rey speaks with a strength she possesses, but cannot wield with any true efficacy. It makes Qi’ra bark a laugh, but it’s sad, weighs someplace around the middle.

“They’ve got unlimited resources and thousands of soldiers waiting for the opportune moment to strike. I’ve worked with men like these before, they won’t stop, they won’t yield. Rey -- it’s important that you listen to me,” Qi’ra’s grabbing her by the upper arms now, her hands shake from the force of it, just this side of painful. Rey nods her understanding, so she continues. “You need to leave -- they only know what the legends of old told them. No one’s stepped foot on Dathomir in half a century with any sort of intent. It’s been neutral ground through nearly two regimes -- we knew that it would come to this eventually.” She lets go of her, unaware that a tear or two have leaked out, traveling down the lines of her face, a story by pathways and age marked skin.

Rey knows the warning is riddled with maternal intent but it sends a shiver up her spine and has her withdrawing from Qi’ra’s arms as if she’d been stung.

“You want me to run away? To _leave_ ?” Incredulously, a clap of thunder saps the moment of its tenderness, and as the light flares hotly across the sky, Rey’s eyes had gone the way of a true sith; veined in hellfire and gold.

She was five when Qi’ra found her. Sun-soaked, starved, huddled in the carcass of an Empire-era AT-AT, to shield herself from the unforgiving desert. It’d been her home for a handful of weeks; and tally marks begun to obscure the far wall (not too many, she’d been plagued by dreams where the scratches numbered in the thousands). A sandstorm drove her towards Rey’s then-home and avoided an untimely -- and unpleasant -- death by the shelter she found.

Rey’d been terrified; thought another slaver had come to steal her away (her parents were coming back, you see), but Qi’ra’s shock and awe radiated nothing but warmth: it is you, she’d said, sensing what she’d been sent here for in the little girl tucked away, a ramshackle doll clutched to her chest and a too-large helmet matting her three buns to the back of her head.

_I’ll keep you safe_, she’d insisted, her hand held out, a ring in her palm - it shone gold in the wan light of dusk, the emblem formed was unfamiliar to her then, but it was oh-so-pretty, and even a novice scavenger would know it’d be worth a hundred thousand portions at least. Rey clutched at it, her toy left to the wayside in favor for this trinket; and Qi’ra smiled brightly, pale eyes full of something unfamiliar to Rey, hope.

_I’ll never leave you_, she’d promised, cradling the malnourished girl to her, Jakku disappearing beneath their feet and blue, so much blue, blurred by in the lanes of hyperspace.

_We will watch over you_. We, now, as a man with horns knelt before her and promised to the oldest gods of old that he’d give her the strength to conquer the world, and to know without a shadow of a doubt that she was worth more than what she’d been sold for.

All of these promises had been made before Rey could comprehend their magnitude; and now, now, as she breathes in tears and exhales ash, she knows what it meant to watch them be broken, one by one.

“I can’t,” Her voice is thick where it catches in her throat and Rey’s grappling desperately to reign in her emotions.

_Peace is a lie, there is only passion_

“You can’t what, Rey?” Qi’ra’s not soft, the iron of the survivor underneath riding her words like a command. “I’m not asking you -- I’m telling you.” And oh, it hurts her to do it because she knows full well why Rey’s aching this way.

Rey sets her jaw, nostrils flaring; she’d always been defiant, always strong, but now she shows that she can be cruel. “I don’t have to listen to you,” Her accent, a mirror of Qi’ra’s own, and the older woman flinches at how imperious it twists the words, Rey’s head held high. “You’re not my master -- he is,” She looks to the temple now, and more thunder wreaths them in threat. “And he’s gone to meditate on this problem. Not to run from it.”

She steps back until she’s beyond Qi’ra’s reach, shaking her head and unwittingly dislodging tears from her eyes, raining them down like dark flecks on the path at her feet.

_Come back_, Rey hears, as she turns away to walk towards her home; the night has fallen darker still, promises, promises of this hellish world churning underneath the First Order’s threat, long, angled shadows slot across the red planes at the mountain’s base.

Crying in earnest now, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate the pavement that twines up the hillside and leads to the temple above. Rey’s walked it twice every day for thirteen years, she should know it by instinct if not sight -- and still, she clips her shoulder on the gnarled finger of a grave thorn, a tree she knew better than to touch.

Blood falls now; blood and tears -- the irony, however poignant, only serves to further rile up the fledgling Sith and she shouts her frustrations to the skies.

As if they’d grant her peace.

_Peace is a lie, there is only passion, through passion, I gain strength, through strength, I gain power, through power, I gain victory, through victory, my chains are broken, the force shall free me._

Rey recites this internally, some fools hope that it would serve its due in grounding her, in stopping the snap-crackle of force energy running like an overworked bit of circuitry through her veins.

She rests her palm over her shoulder where the fresh wound continues to weep; power then, a white-hot surge of it and she’s healed it, warm, wet, red, but left without a trace of where it’d come from.

Healing, a sign of the light; Rey knows this but she’s unafraid. Her loyalties are built on a solid foundation and it would take more than just a utilitarian trick to sway or convince her otherwise.

It’s dangerous for her to live so far in her head, so deeply and completely; but what had they expected? She’s got them; two people she knew, and no one else. A growing girl needed friends her age to acclimate to adolescence, and so Rey’d only been guided by the firm hand of a Sith Lord and his criminal companion.

Rey loves them.

Or at the very least, she respects them.

The air is thick in that way before a storm, but one’s been brewing for a long while now and it does not explain the shift; the weight that’s got her shoulders lifting defensively up the back of her neck, the hair at its nape raising.

This all tells Rey one thing; danger is near.

It stands to reason that the First Order dreadnought is to blame, unmoving from the spot it’s been in since coming into their system. A black stain in a kaleidoscope sky; Rey pauses, a half step from the temple’s entrance to look upon it.

Massive is Rey’s first thought; she’s only seen the Scimitar, half-rusted and a dozen miles away; and Qi’ra’s vessel -- some ungainly straight shot flying castle that she’s not sure has a name.

This isn’t a small, personal shuttle or something outfitted for single combat. It’s large enough to take out a battalion; to mow down or house an army. Large enough to pose a threat to a family of Sith.

Large enough to conquer a planet.

Rey can’t repress the shudder that rattles her slight frame; she isn’t afraid, but like calls to like in her intrinsic draw to power. It thrums through the living force, it is respect and the natural order both; she feels it, not unlike the lightning streaking across the sky. It pulses in the back of her head, a voice: don’t be afraid.

She hisses, mirroring the Zabrak that’s taken the place at her side; only for him to grab Rey’s hands and drag her into the temple, the protective cloak of the force wrapping around them, an invisible barrier that stops Rey from feeling the oppressive force of something distant but nonetheless powerful.

“What was that?” Rey cries out in surprise, Maul’s since let her go and is pacing rapidly, in short distanced bursts.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly, and Rey hates just how unnerved he appears to be by that truth.

For all her known life Darth Maul has been a legend, tangentially, but a father figure above all else; Rey both heard and saw first hand what he is capable of, and she thirsted for all the knowledge he’d impose: from Master to Apprentice. Such were the ways of the old.

Now, though, he’s feral, _unhinged_, Rey can sense his panic bleeding into the force between them and not only is it uncharacteristic of the Sith Lord, but it’s enough that Rey distances herself from him physically, much as she had Qi’ra not ten minutes before.

“That’s not good enough.” Rey spits. Any other time she’d have fear of repercussion, but then, just then, she felt as though she is the only one of the three that isn’t buckling under the pressure of the unknown.

Sure, Rey’s worried but what good does that do? She can compartmentalize if it means handling high-stress situations well.

Adapt to survive; it’s what Rey’s always done best. 

Maul pauses, and looks towards Rey; the shadows at his back are shifting and no sooner had he opened his mouth to speak than a crackling spit of red light pierces his chest from behind. Through and through, a lightsaber blinking and spluttering as if it is comprised of fire alone and not the plasma she knew it to be.

His eyes go dark first; once vibrant, full of life (and wrath in equal measure), in the split second before his body falls, a dull thud in the otherwise silent temple.

Rey can count on one hand the number of times she’d seen him smile; a memory, sharp and invasive like the tears she feels stinging her eyes.

A hot spring around back -- she’d nearly fallen in twice before, but that time Maul oversaw her escapade, jumping into a small pool that didn’t run quite as hot as its neighbors. She giggled, absolutely enraptured by any body of water but that this one was special, she was tall enough to stand on her tiptoes and still keep her head above the surface. He’d still watch her, diligent, ensuring that she was never in harm's way.

She’d enthused about swimming, and so Maul had taught her how. Not in the puddles, no, but a lake with a loamy shore and water that’s pink and green, leached minerals from the alkaline bedrock striking the surface in an oil slick. Harmless, but Rey had thought it the prettiest thing and was amused by the way she floated, her tunic fanned out like a halo.

Maul instructed her there; basic strokes, he’d treat it like a survival necessity (any number of worlds they’d visit later on could have vast oceans and rivers that would necessitate her learning to swim), but part of Rey always knew, even then, that he’d done it because it made her happy.

One particularly warm afternoon, they’d gone down to the water’s edge and Rey’d dunked her head in -- to cool down, she’d explained, but all it did was matte her hair so it ran slick down her back, and Maul had chuckled amusedly. Rey looked up at him, one eye closed and the other squinting, “What do your horns do?” So baldly, so bluntly, that it’d blindsided the Zabrak.

He barked a laugh, just once, and Rey’s face twisted up in a frustrating display; he wasn't taking her questions seriously -- but the next thing he did had Rey in stitches.

Maul ran his hands through her hair (short, cropped to fall along her jaw; practicality above vanity) and as wet as it was, it took the shape he haphazardly crafted. Tufts of chestnut formed into a crown of makeshift horns, so that he and Rey could _match_.

She’d worn them proudly, until gravity played its part and took each away, one by one.

Funny, how in the thick of it she’d been angry at him, frustrated that the two and only people in her life could not give her answers the one time she’d asked something that had not been clearly explained.

Now though, all she cares to remember are the moments where she’d been happy, safe, loved and cared for in a way her biological family had not seen to.

And this masked creature had taken it all away.

In a flash she draws Maul’s saber to herself, igniting one of the blades as she reaches for her own, and does the same. Two saber staffs, half-lit, each with an angry bright spit of crimson ready to cut vengeance from sinew and bone. Rey has half a mind to dual wield them as they’re intended, as a staff with two beams but it felt sort of justified to use her master’s weapon to grant him retribution after death.

Rey leaps forward, a battle cry clawing its way up her throat; it disarms her opponent momentarily. His dark robes billow out, breeding uniformity with the shadows that flicker in the low lighting of the temple; but it is his mask that caught Rey’s eyes. For one, it’s a kriffing mask and the last person to wear one and wield a red saber is Darth Vader, and he’s decidedly not the long-dead Sith Lord. And secondly; in the intermittent flashes of their blades colliding, it paints a haunting picture, and Rey cannot discredit the intimidation factor it plays, or how she’s lost her footing twice.

He fights differently than Maul, and though Rey has dedicated every spare hour to sparring, studying stances and postures; how to retaliate against a litany of assaults. Each swing of his saber is heavy, and when it collides with her own Rey’s heels slide back on the smooth stone floor. Her right shoulder has begun to act, absorbing most of the impact until she sets her jaw and Rey feels it rattle all the way through her teeth. It’s painful, but through pain there is clarity.

Through pain, strength.

Rey grunts through his next barrage; but she regains the footing she’s lost and is attacking him with every ounce of strength she has left -- for Maul, for everything she’s ever known and the threat of losing it, and for herself.

This is her life, and Rey’s fought tooth and nail to survive this far, to earn her place as an apprentice to the once (and always) great Darth Maul.

“You killed him,” Her voice is high and tight; Rey cannot even recognize it as her own; she can’t hear all that well as it is, there’s been ringing in her ears for the past few minutes and she attributes it to the whine of colliding sabers.

The masked man does not speak, but there’s a growl that’s nearly inhuman, a voice modulator, Rey surmises, and in that millisecond where she draws both weapons back to spin, a perfect mirror of Maul’s training, just this morning; Rey finds herself frozen in place. A warbling, low, she feels rather than hears the distortion in the force that has her pinned.

“What was he to you?” He speaks, and the baritone sends chills through her, but she can feel autonomy returning to her in inches. Bit by bit, pins and needles first but its cold, like ice in her veins but she can’t quite feel it; removed, like distant, an echo of a sensation but it’s present enough that she can tell his grip is fading.

“My master,” Rey grits out, and it gives the man pause.

“You’re Sith?” He regards Rey differently; it’s still distorted by the mask but she can denote a shift in inflection, his posture is stiff, drawing to his full (and remarkable) height, and when he speaks next, it’s immediately beside her, “Apprentice.”

Rey hisses, and had Maul been alive he would have been proud of the hatred festering deep and dark and turbulent.

“I have no Master, I belong to no one,” She wrenches free of the paralysis and throws the stranger back with a powerful blow to the chest, the force interlocking as a battle of wits and wills ensues.

Rey screams, and the stranger’s helmet is ripped off of him, leaving him exposed. A man with dark features; broad, wide, obscured faintly by a mop of windswept black hair. Like ink.

Like shadow.

“If you’re Sith,” He begins, grunting as they’re locked together by an unseen, telekinetic thread, “and I killed your Master -- as the standing elder I command you back down.” His voice is still low, even without the modulator, and Rey’s once more shuddering, shivering as if they weren’t surrounded by fire, locked in a heated biome with a supernova burning brightly above.

Rey wants to argue this, wants to scream and shout and do everything right by her fallen master but there’s a voice at the back of her head that tells her to yield, to stand down and do what is instructed by the code, not by her broken heart.

She listens.

The moment she withdraws her power, his knocks her back. But she lands hard on one knee, and in that. Rey bows.

“You need a teacher,” He says, and Rey nods; hers is gone; she’d been told to leave and Rey hadn’t. The sound of a ship breaking atmo is all Rey needs to know about Qi’ra’s choice, and so she’s left with one.

“Master,” Rey’s voice betrays the tears hidden by how her hair slips forward, obscuring her voice.

“You may call me Kylo Ren.”


	2. Chapter 2

Qi’ra was pacing, the soft pattering of her desert cloth shoes against the hardened stone beneath the only sound in their small hut. That, and Maul’s uneven breathing.

“How could you keep this from her? From us?”

“You must understand--” He tries.

“No, don’t placate me. I’m not a child.”

But to the Zabrak, Qi’ra was.

That didn’t mean he was fool enough to say so.

She cast him a withering stare, and he stirred uneasily. Rey was a point of contention for them, even in the first few months of their housing her, their clothing, feeding, and caring for her. Qi’ra wanted a daughter, and Maul, well he wanted a student.

And in that, he wanted recompense for all that had been taken from him. It was his chance to take, to run the well dry.

Rey was strong with the force even so young that she could not yet understand it, knee-high and jaded against anything and everyone.

“What good would come of her knowing?” Maul challenged, upper lip fixed in a half-snarl- no genuine malice was held for his cohabitant but that did not mean she should have pressed him, as she of course, immediately did.

Qi’ra folded her arms over her chest, manicured brow lofted and eyes inscrutable beneath, “I wasn’t aware that it was anyplace on your agenda to do what is good, or best for her.” It was a low blow, but it hit its mark when the Sith Lord stood tall over her, feral, and only thinly contained.

  


“If she knew, it could ruin everything. We’ve only just begun to unearth her potential I won’t have it stripped away by mistakes of a bygone era.” And that ended that as he stormed out of the secluded room, nearly crashing into a hidden, eavesdropping Rey.

That’s the last thing she saw -- the fear in his eyes when he’d caught her hidden by the feathered fronds of a redweed fern, just beyond the doorway.

***

Rey woke, not having remembered ever falling asleep. _Had she?_ She does not feel rested, if anything the sting of her injuries, belayed by the adrenaline and shock of the fight, are now felt in their entirety. Limbs ache, but she’s able to move them -- always the immediate concern-- shifting out of the cramped bunk to stand in the center of the room, dark as pitch and entirely unfamiliar.

_Where is she?_

More questions rattle around her brain as it claws its way towards consciousness - still caught on the edge of sleep where it sits in her periphery like a tactile fog. She’s fighting to recall whatever it is she’d dreamed of, but only manages to catch it in vague, shapeless glimpses.

It eludes her, and in her addled state, frustration wins out over curiosity and Rey huffs her malcontent into the recycled air around her.

“You’re awake,” the whiz-click-purr of his mask twists the simple phrase into something bleak and nearly sinister. Rey shivers despite the warmth of the room, trying, and failing, to let her eyes adjust so that she can see who she already knew lurks just beyond the dim glow of her bedside chrono.

_Kriff_ \-- it’s either very early, or very late. Rey’s mind is currently not intact enough to do more than speculate.

And still, she does.

Pieces begin to fall into place - and if she strains, Rey can recall the last breath she’d taken of the alkaline, Dathomir atmosphere. Her head is still fogged by an untended wound (when this Kylo Ren had thrown her back against the temple floor), but as her Master had reminded her many times before; she’s hardheaded, bullheaded, and as stubborn as a bantha.

Rey’s lips twitch unwittingly, as memories come to passively aid her, they remove the fatality of whatever it is she’s landed herself directly in the middle of.

“I am,” she finally remembers to answer him, though she belatedly realizes the question is rhetorical. Kylo huffs, it sounds like a hiss when it passes through his modulator and Rey wonders if he wore it to intimidate. To bully.

If so, it’s working, but why would he have it on here and now if he isn't also just a little bit afraid?

That makes Rey bold, or at least, less unnerved by the mystery he presents himself as.

“How did I get here?” She’s not going to let that go. The last thing she can truly recall is a gloved hand in her face, and everything going mottled grey around the edges. It’s a sensation she’d undergone once before, in that very same fight.

That’s why, when Rey realizes he’d knocked her unconscious and kidnapped her, the force echoes her wrath.

“We’re in an Upsilon shuttle hurtling through the outer rim at light speed - I wouldn’t do that unless you enjoy the slow, miserable death that accompanies getting spaced .” He sounds as if she’s boring him, and that too, makes Rey mad.

It’s a skill this stranger has in excess.

\--- but he’s got a point there nonetheless, and so Rey moves to calm herself, taking a seat on the edge of her bed so she doesn’t have to focus on anything but regulating the erratic beat of her heart.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they.” Monotone, her eyes fixed on the heavily tinted transparisteel, darkly veiling the sea of stars twinkling as if there’s truly any bright left to this abyss. Beyond that, she wonders what remains of Dathomir, her once and always home.

Kylo sounds as if he’s panting, eluding her question until he can no longer. “Yes.” Matter-of-factly, unaffected by what had been deemed a necessary act by his master, and so Rey nods as if she understands.

She doesn’t.

The regulation mattress might as well be stone or snow beneath her, it is cold, impersonal, but she’s sunk into it all the same. Rey clutches at sheets of grave-dirt, her heart filling with rot. She thinks of Mauls body, caught under the rubble of the temple as it falls, the world consumed by hellfire and ruin around him.

Her eyes shut, as if the room (her cell?) is not so dark they might as well have taken her sight along with everything and everyone she’s ever known.

“Why?” Emotion blurs the edges of her adopted, impersonal tone, rattling until it’s unrecognizable as her own.

He doesn’t answer her, rising from where’d been crouching (not like Rey can kriffing tell, he’s as much the shadow as the lightless room around her) before moving to the doorway. It hisses open, the fluorescents just beyond are blinding to her now nocturnally adjusted eyes, forcing Rey to turn, jaw clenching around a curse that sounds an awful lot like his name.

Kylo stops beyond the fitted metal door jamb, the creak of his leather gloves mocking as they sit in a heavy, hate-filled silence. “My Master commanded it of me.” In terms he knew a Sith like Rey, however young, however reactionary, would have no choice but to understand.

As if she’d then forgive him.

Can she?

And if she can, if she eventually _did_, what would it mean to him?

Rey doesn’t respond and Kylo must then take her silence as acceptance or dismissal - it matters not when held against the tapestry of every horror he’s had his hand in, ever murderous act.

There’s far too much, fusing together as some sort of pulsing, heinous mass.

She curls back in on herself, barely a wrinkle to the military press of the sheets tucked in tight around her bed’s four corners, and Rey knew she’d sleep on top of them restlessly, pretending that when she’d wake next, this would have all been a dream.

A nightmare, with this monster Kylo Ren at the heart of it.

***

Kylo is a Knight and by nature, obedient. _Loyal_.

He is the right hand of the Supreme Leader and the bidding of his master is the freest his will shall ever be or had ever been. It’s tragic, if he looks on it too long, the warped outline of the man that’s more hate and heartache than flesh and bone.

His fingers flex around the hilt of his saber -- for what? There’s nothing nearby for him to maim, nothing to break, no place to pour all of this sourceless, baseless rage.

Kylo settles on a shower that runs too hot, steam a healthy substitute for feeling and the stinging burn of a sonic that’s like water but not quite, sobers him from these thoughts of a weaker, foolish man.

_Ben Solo is dead_, he thinks, jaw sawing back and forth to cut out the roots planted by doubt. He can’t afford it, not after all he’s done to stand where he does now.

He sees Han Solo in the shape of his jaw, so he’d smashed the mirror his first night on his command shuttle. Command shuttle. As if he’s a leader, all raw and rough and damned from the start. He’s not even fit to lead himself, much less any other.

And then his thoughts fall on her. The Girl.

_Rey_.

He’d been told by Snoke to purge all Sith. He’d cut down a half dozen nightsisters long before he’d ventured towards the ancient temple, looming like a scar, a nostalgic and useless pile of stones that showed the failures of the bygone past.

_Let it all die_.

This is his first act of betrayal, letting Rey live. He stands under the artificial stream until his body begins to feel the extent of the day’s labors, and he abandons these thoughts as he does all others.

Someplace out of reach from the shadow that stalks the corners of his mind.

Kylo steps out of the shower feeling somehow less clean than he had going into it; there’s no amount of scrubbing that can strip his soul of all that red, nothing to expunge the blood on his hands. He grabs at a coarse towel -- practicality over comfort in the First Order -- and dries himself off in gruff, broad passes. The less time spent staring at the pale patchwork of scars, the less he has to remember.

The air of his ship is crisp, and Kylo welcomes the sting of it down, inflating his lungs that’d been heavy with heat only moments before.

It isn’t pleasant, but things rarely are for Kylo Ren.

He’s set a course for The Supremacy, knowing he’d have to bring his apprentice before his master and bid that he spares her life.

For what? And _why?_

Kylo has plenty of time to mull this over while Rey sulks in the bedroom he’d left her in. It’s his, not that it’s at all relevant, or that the only other bed left to him is half a foot too small; this might even be misinterpreted as kindness. Of which he owes her none.

Little red and blue lights flicker all along the flight console, Kylo stares at them, eyes unfocused and thoughts drifting far.

He’s not a good man, he doesn’t do things because they’re right he does things because it’s the will of his Supreme Leader and because he can . It’s infantile and blatantly selfish, and ultimately what led him to take Rey in.

Did he truly save her if he’s only postponing the inevitability of her death by his hand?

His jaw sets once more, and Kylo Ren is lost to the turmoil of his unhinged mind. Darkness dawns on his horizon but light fights the good fight despite the depth of the hatred it’s housed in. He resents it in equal measure that he holds out hope that it might be enough where all else failed.

It might be what saves him.

Treasonous thoughts are venom to the blooded beast that he is, and Kylo rejects them as a child might a dissatisfying meal.

He sits up properly in his pilot’s seat and with an inherited set of skills, maneuvers his ship through the debris field that circles the idle fleet. There are a half dozen Star Destroyers, a dreadnought at their center and behind this impressive, imposing line of war machines sits Snoke’s flagship. The Supremacy.

His fingers tighten subconsciously around the ship’s yoke, slowing their approach she can let the tractor draw them in (and to give him time to speak to Rey, warn her, or apologize if nothing else).

Kylo certainly feels sorry, but for what remains unclear.

A huff of a sigh feathers out the errant tufts of hair that have fallen in front of his eyes - the helmet is practical, and so he’s grown unaccustomed to having it off. It made him feel impermeable, inhuman, deathless.

Without it, he’s human, and horribly, damnably flawed.

There’s not enough time -- there never is -- but he hurries to where Rey sleeps, her soft, snuffling snore audible through tempered steel. He’d smile if he rememberes how, but he opens the door and barks at her to ‘wake up’.

Her head slams against the wall as she flinches awake, and Kylo’s lips curl into the closest approximation of a grin he’s worn to date.

“I need to speak with you,” he clarifies as if that somehow undoes the fact that she’d nearly concussed herself because Kylo has the bedside manner of a rancor.

Now’s not the time for indecision to stay his hand.

Rey stares dully up at him -- why does it burn him to see hate there? Has a lifetime of finding it in strangers not numbed him to it by now? He knows it’s because way, deep down, he wanted to have someone see him for who he is, not what he’s done.

It’s too late for that, though.

“Snoke --- my master, the Supreme Leader ordered the destruction of your planet and all who lived on it. He calls it the purge -- the same has happened to all other known Sith and Jedi temples alike. A clean slate, if you will.” He clears his throat; it’s so different to speak to Rey bare, without the filter of his mask. He feels vulnerable, exposed.

Rey doesn’t speak, the longer she remains silent (and by extension, the one in control) Kylo feels his tension rise because she’s not taking this seriously enough. He makes a sound of annoyance, and steps forward, forcing Rey to tilt her chin if she insists on holding his gaze.

“He will be … ruthless, in his judgment of you.” It’s clear that Kylo is holding back, even to someone who does not know him. Doesn’t she? Kylo feels haunted by the way her hazel eyes have hollowed him out in their assessment.

When he’d wanted Rey to see him differently -- this is not what he’d had in mind.

“I can’t -- protect you --” He’s going to continue that thought but Rey stands tall, toe to toe with him and even though he dwarfs her in height, she’s filling the room with a cutting power that cows the Knight in him, he nearly drops to a knee.

“I don’t need protecting,” she enunciates each word clearly, and with steel-tipped teeth.

Kylo does not doubt the truth of that, but she misunderstands the gravity of the situation if she thinks she’ll be able to do anything but endure.

“Snoke is not like a Sith, he is not like anything or anyone.” Quietly, even though his Master will hear, he’ll come to claw Kylo’s mind to pieces in the hunt for just one fact -- how many times as he undone his apprentice, only for the fun of watching him try to make himself whole? “He will kill you, and you won’t be able to do anything about it.” Through his teeth, it’s enough for Rey to shiver and her defiance begins to thaw into fear.

_Good_. Bile on his tongue, he swallows the bitter taste of it down.

“If you want to live, you mustn’t resist him. Swear your loyalty… disown the ways of old and let him see that it is true within you.” Kylo’s voice shifts, a flip switched; he’s incapable of softness as the dark shroud of the flagship’s hangar swallows the shuttle whole.

He nods to Rey on his departure, donning the mask that named him a Knight of Ren.

***

Rey survived the sand and sun of Jakku, and all Dathomir’s horrors; molded by a Master of the Dark side and now, is beholden to the demands of another one. What has she to fear? She’s lost everything, all that remains that is her own, is Rey’s life.

But even that isn’t enough to arouse fear.

She knows, rationally, that she should at least have the good sense to lean into self-preservation, but she remains impassive. All is as the force wills it to be.

Is anger not a tool of the Sith? Why is it that now of all times, Rey cannot find it in herself to be anything but resigned?

She noses around the room a bit, but there’s nothing. She’s not sure what she’d hopes to find, maybe, at least, a change of clothes. Her own are clodded in dust, stains of red from the sand of a now-dead world, and torn at the edges. Rey’s battle-hardened, it shows. Maybe it’s good that she keeps it, wears her savagery on her sleeve.

The ship comes to a lurching halt (a warning might’ve been nice), knocking Rey forward so that she has to claw at the lip of a viewport so that she remains standing.

Kylo’s left her to assume that they’ve reached their end- so Rey, surprised to find her door unlocked, ventures out into the main hall of his command vessel. It’s black in every place that allows it, bleak, meticulously maintained (a point of pride for the masked creature, no doubt), and devoid of any personal effects. Rey knew from experience that even Darth Vader had outfitted his quarters, his TIE fighter, to suit his needs.

Curious, that Kylo who is decidedly unique, has done everything in his power to remove identity from where he resides. Anonymous, to even himself. With that mask .. when’s the last time he looked himself in the eyes?

Rey doesn’t have time to ponder or pity, as a rough, gloved hand wraps around her bicep and Kylo Ren is hauling her down the unfurling flight plank, and into a hangar teeming with Stormtroopers. Each of them identical, in manner and motion, they’ve long ago stopped looking at Kylo but through their garish white faces, Rey can feel their eyes on her.

_They hate me_, she thinks, but can only find that her heart and head agree.

The force runs tight here; impossibly so, like a nexus supercharging it and a black hole siphoning all the strength from her both -- Rey’s legs are coltish, but Kylo’s tightening grip tells her to stand tall.

Or maybe it’s his kindness, trying to support the slight weight of her as it presses unceremoniously into his side.

Rey thinks it’s the culmination of the last twenty-four hours, everything has changed so completely, not a single part of her has had a chance to process any of it.

She’d lost her family. Rey has lost her family _twice_ now.

It’s exhausting in a way that she cannot begin to explain, and so she doesn’t. She won’t have the chance. For gloom weighs around her, foreboding and damning and somehow veined in relief.

This Supreme Leader means to kill her, Rey might let him.

_No_.

Weakness has no home in her heart and resignation cannot be called anything but -- Rey’s jaw sets and she wrenches her arm from Kylo’s grasp.

She’s never needed help before and she’s certainly not going to start now.

Kylo’s warning echoes through her mind, punctuated by their footfall on durasteel, shimmering, dark and bleak in all directions - dim, low light guides them down the hall and a general sense of melancholy sits low in the belly of all she comes to see.

This might be the saddest thing she’s ever had to witness, and knowing that her only option is to become a part of it, makes the remnants of her soul, weep.

But the hardened girl that stops at the doorway to the throne room? There are no tears left in her, only the calm clarity of a hurricane.

Walls lined in red are a sharp contrast to the monochrome world behind her -- it’s entirely unsurprising that a megalomaniac would adorn his kingdom in grandeur -- and Rey’s forced to mask what would be a snarl on anyone else’s lips, but she presents it to Snoke as a smile.

“My worthy apprentice,” The sycophantic drawl gnaws through the sinew of the force. Kylo’s dropped to one knee immediately thereafter, and had Rey been given the chance she would join him but there’s an abrupt and powerful weight on her shoulders that forces Rey down, her chin connects with the floor, _hard_, and she tastes the copper sting of blood.

She almost spits it on his the polished metal she’s held against, but figures that won’t help her cause.

“The task I gave you was simple, was it not?” His voice remains steady but even from here, Rey can feel Kylo’s muscle tense one by one - a lifelong familiarity with this, then.

Pity obscures the pain in her jaw. She’d thought Kylo the hunter, but he’s living, suffering bait. Repeatedly broken, bones set by the placating praise of a monster, what part of him has healed right? Is this why he took Rey?

This lonely, lonely boy.

“It was.” Kylo tries to replicate the calm of his master, but there’s fear pouring from him, and Rey stirs against the floor - only for the pressure to double, and her lungs to strain against the brittle cage of her ribs.

Snoke stands, scuttling towards them and _oh_, how it makes Rey’s skin crawl.

“Then. Explain. This.” He toes Rey’s arm, pinned beneath her -- it’s as if she’s lower than low, scum.

A nothing, nowhere girl stripped of agency, of power.

She wants nothing more than to kill Snoke, and he evidently senses that, leering down at Rey with eyes that reflect only malice, “The purge is essential. A foundation on which we will build the greatest empire the galaxy has ever seen and yet --” He walks over to Kylo, arms linked behind his back as if it were an innocuous conversation between two political figures, and not the condemnation and wrath of a tyrant, with Kylo cowed by a terror Rey cannot comprehend.

“There’s a weed in my garden, Ren. Do you not know how the strongest forests grow? The ones before them are burned to ash! ” He shouts, Kylo flinches. Rey does not.

Snoke shifts into a softer tone, “You will do as you were commanded from the start. You will strip every star system of Sith and Jedi alike. Start here, finish this.”

Kylo rises from where he’d been kneeling and stands in front of Rey, his hand shakes until it’s anchored around the hilt of his saber, voice low. “Supreme Leader---” Before he’s permitted to finish, the _pop_ of electricity surges between them, and Kylo drops to the floor below. Rage breaks against the hold Snoke’s had on Rey, allowing her to rush to his side, he’s conscious, but disoriented as his nerves are stripped raw.

“You’re a monster,” Rey growls, an intention in the set of her jaw, the cleft between her brow. Snoke laughs, thick, mocking, like viscous swill in place of a sound; he tries to unleash the same unto Rey but it’s halted.

She stops him in his tracks, it is taking every ounce of strength in her arsenal but it’s a well she’d willfully run dry if it meant keeping herself (and maybe even Kylo, by extension) alive. The Supreme Leader wears a look of shock that’s quickly replaced by malformed joy- a _smile_, Rey shudders, if he had features capable of supporting the shape.

“My my, perhaps my apprentice has found me a worthy trinket after all.” He croons, and the last thing Rey sees is red, quickly followed by black.

He senses greatness in her, Rey feels it pulsing as reality slips away.


	3. Chapter 3

Rey has interacted with approximately a dozen people outside of her immediate family-- Maul, Qi’ra, and a nightsister that’d taken a liking to Rey, but whose name she had never managed to pronounce and so she called her _Mina_. They’re her friends, her mentors, her family; and all of her exposure to social engagement stem from the time spent growing up beside them.

How to argue, how to fight, what the stars told her in their sector, how to mend the great many holes accrued in her clothing (she was a messy, haphazard child, and so it was a frequent occurrence) but most importantly: to know what she deserved.

She hadn’t deserved abandonment, she hadn’t deserved starvation’s keen sting.

Rey deserved respect, and she knew better than to settle for anything less.

Maul and Qi’ra’s relationship had set a very specific set of standards; Rey never saw softness, theirs was a hard love. All steel, vestigial horns, hellfire, and promises whispered so quietly they might as well have been born of a fever dream.

***

Qi’ra was a small thing, curled up on a lap that’s half flesh and half mechanical, but all real, and all wanting for the woman Maul’s arms were wrapped around. Sith don’t love, they possess, they take and take and take until there is nothing left that isn’t consumed. He’d spent the day in nearby unallied ports to try and find word of what this growing, distant shadow wanted. The First Order wasn’t a real threat, not to them, not just yet.

So he’d been welcomed home by an eager apprentice and the sultry, doe-eyed right hand turned .. something … someone, where Maul had spent the better part of his life alone. He’s still unlearning, relearning, adjusting his behaviors so he could touch her without decay falling through his fingers, an inevitability while hand in hand with hate.

Rey’d seen them, her fingers laced through his as her empty palm fit neatly in place. Her heart twinged, what for? And why? All fifteen years of her and she’d never had an impulse towards anything like affection, adoration; hormones in a young Sith are a dangerous affair so Maul had instructed her to meditate for six hours every night, to watch the sunset and know that no matter how bright a day could be, darkness was inevitable..

On that day, she’d disobeyed.

She didn’t qualify it as spying, per se, but Maul and Qi’ra weren’t exactly subtle, sitting on a bench carved of Mustafarian obsidian (a part of Vader’s castle, he’d told Rey once), and he was speaking a language Rey could only catch the tone of.

The living force pulsed with heat, and for the first time in her life, Rey felt what want could mean beyond food, beyond water, beyond a roof above her head. To want touch in a way that didn’t constitute hand-to-hand. To see it as something as natural as breathing.

Rey felt it, just that once, and swore to never allow herself such weakness again.

If you want something, it can always be used against you in some way.

Children forged by hardships, nurtured by the visceral manifestation of hate as it bleeds into the force, don’t know what to do with anything else. With anyone else. So this pain is housed in familiarity, and though it hurts, it’s at least something she can hold on to.

When Rey’s drawn from the thicket of her unsolicited memory, it’s by someplace cold and cruel.

***

She gasps awake, fire and ice fighting for dominance as to which is burning her lungs, ash in the back of her mouth -- Rey coughs, and blood splatters on the front of a white, medical regulation tunic.

When had she landed in the med-bay? Who had changed her clothes?

The last two living souls Rey had been around are Supreme Leader Snoke and Kylo fucking Ren.

She’s not sure which prospect is more unsettling.

The whirr of a medical droid’s processor forces Rey back into the moment, it’s tending to a burn on her forearm, and changing the fluids hanging from a chrome hook at her bedside. She’s not sure what’s wrong with her, and when she attempts to coax the information from the mech, it speaks in a binary that’s hard for Rey to translate in her addled state.

That doesn’t make her soft and cautious - a child’s foolishness, it makes her violent -- but when she reaches to tap into that great, deep well of power in the back of her head.

Rey cannot feel it.

She tries again, and again, panic forcing the monitor to beep as her heart rate spikes erratically, Rey cannot breathe long enough to think rationally, or reasonably. So she cries tears of rage, pawing at the metal that has her clipped to the bed.

Rey’s been cut off from the force.

In her panicked state, she hadn’t bothered to look around, to take stock of her surroundings, but the stir of fabric and the sleep-thick sigh directly to her right are an instant paralytic. She works to even out her breathing, and turns (as well as she can, she is restrained after all) to find the origin of the noise.

Kylo Ren, curled up in a laughably small chair, is sound asleep -- also worth noting: he appears to be unscathed, which makes Rey almost burst out in a fit of giggles, but also wildly, unfairly, angry.

He stirs, able to feel Rey’s eyes on him even in a state of unconsciousness, and stands tall as if one side of his raven mane wasn’t stuck to the side of his face. Rey snorts at the sight of him, and Kylo scowls.

Somehow the Knight conquers his ego, and lumbers over to Rey’s bedside, dark eyes flitting to where the blanket’s bunch up around her knees, a bare flash of tan, freckled skin -- she’s quick to cover it.

“What happened?” Rey groans, rubbing at her temple with the heel of her hand, chasing off the edges of a pounding headache (well, everything hurts, she can’t quite tell where one part of it stops and another begins).

Kylo’s jaw works as he contemplates how best to answer her, “The Supreme Leader … took something from you. He does it to all force sensitives that come into the fold of the first order.” As if it were some great and noble undertaking -- Rey, however, feels like she’s been spliced by fire.

She gestures to the cuffs on her wrist, and she swears, _swears_ she sees Kylo’s lips twitch into a near grin.

“A formality. You’re rather strong, we didn’t know how amicable you’d be when you awoke.”

Rey supposes that’s fair, if irritating, and slumps back into the bed, “Well, I’m not going to kill you just yet. Can you please take them off?” Only it doesn’t really sound like she’s asking; force suppression is an absolute thorn in the side, but Rey knows it’s a temporary one, better to let it fade away than draw attention to how fiercely she’s ripping it apart from the inside, out.

They’d underestimated her once, Rey doubts they’ll make that same mistake again. Complacency, while not in her nature, lends itself to longevity -- and if the gauge of Snoke’s reaction to her strength is anything to go by, Rey is in this for the long haul.

She stacks the thin pillows behind her to try and have something resembling lumbar support; but they’re ineffectual at best, and Rey huffs, resigning herself to feel the smooth, cold paneling of the clinic walls between her shoulder blades. Lying down is.. vulnerable, what with Kylo Ren looming over her like a totem of some beautiful, evil god. It doesn’t help that he’s staring at her, too.

On display, like an animal at auction; she’s a parcel in Snoke’s pocket and while that notion has her fuming, Rey manages a placid outward appearance. There’s a beat of silence where Kylo’s dark eyes shift from the cuffs that are leaving purple rings against Rey’s wrists, and the stubborn set of her jaw.

He considers this, before waving his hand, flippant, releasing Rey from her constraints and she immediately starts to rub at the marks to try and get sensation back into her bruised fingertips. She’s still mad at him but gives Kylo a look of thanks as she rearranges herself multiple times on the mattress to try and get comfortable.

She’s too bullheaded to admit that it’s impossible at this point.

“The Supreme Leader thought it wise to repress your access to the force, it is temporary.” As if he’s listing off the least interesting fact he’s ever come across -- Rey knows it’s due to his waning conscious, that way, deep down, he feels guilt.

“Be sure to send him my thanks,” Rey snipes, tongue thick against the roof of her mouth -- she’s dehydrated by the day(s?) events, and reaches for the cup of water at her bedside, the thin metal straw coming to rest between her lips. Kylo swallows at the sight and moves to pace in the small space allocated to her as a ‘private’ room.

She thinks it's because Snoke fears anyone else knowing that he’d been bested, even temporarily, by an unknown agent of a long-dead order.

Rey blooms at the notion that she poses a threat at all, and is quick to challenge her supposed superior while she has the high ground.

“Mind telling me why I’m still alive?”

***

What would he be without the strength and comfort of the force? The only constant in his Sisyphean toil between the light, and the dark. How is she, not only calm but quick to her wit and relatively unfazed in an otherwise upsetting situation?

Kylo can recall all three instances The Supreme Leader had severed his connection, numbed him from that _raw, untamed power_, with vivid clarity.

_Never_ is he reasonable; he’d thrown a fit that split the hull of several idle TIEs - the force out of reach but his saber arcing violently.

So, watching Rey … is equal parts disorienting and infuriating.

Kylo stirs a little, the heavy fabrics of his mantle seem to buffet the recycled air: no matter how much he wears, he is chilled to the bone. To the soul, in tatters, though it may be. He can’t figure her out; he’d stayed by her side -- at his Master’s behest -- but in that time he can feel her lifeforce shifting within the force itself, it’d once been so bright, now submerged in the darkness that rivals his own.

What had happened to provoke this beautiful creature’s fall from grace?

He shakes his head, sable eyes falling to the floor below, “Snoke saw greatness in you.”_ In your bloodline_, “and found it a viable asset to the success of his coming empire.” Rey seems to flinch away from his tone, but Kylo cannot speak with inflection without the risk of his feelings making everything that much more difficult to navigate.

He’s tried to kill them, wrapped his fingers around the throat of his heart and squeezed -- but they lived on, they endured.

“Oh good, I’m glad that as he tried to kill me, my unwillingness to die showed promise.” He can tell that Rey’s adopting his cadence to mock him, but the imperious curl of her accent has the Knight stitched to his bones drawn to obey the courtly word. His muscles twitch, but he does not kneel. Not yet. Not for her.

Instead, he stops his pacing and turns to look on her with what he hopes is severity. Rey holds his gaze, and doesn’t move in the least -- he thinks even her breathing has stilled as she waits for whatever venom Kylo can conjure and spew.

“You lived, isn’t that what matters most? Or are you so infantile that you’d martyr yourself for everything you’ve lost? Let it go, let it _die_. You are worth more to this galaxy as a fighter than you are as a corpse.”

There’s heat to it that he can’t quite mask, or how his jaw has worked over the words several times over as he chews on them before he’d spat them out.

She’s infuriating, _absolutely_ infuriating.

But for once, the chill in his veins slips away and Kylo Ren knows what it means to be made to feel alive.

How dare she cow the beast in him. How dare she draw close the festering wound of his dichotomous soul. She’s nothing. She’s no one. A nowhere girl from a backwater world and she’d been taught the lessons of a dying breed; she cannot hold a flame to his power, his clout, his intergalactic pedigree.

Who does she think she is? Making gentle, a monster?

Kylo runs his tongue along his teeth, sucking in a breath because Rey’s deceptively quiet and it’s setting him on edge more than he’d like to admit.

He steps forward, steps into what he’s going to say but Rey’s quicker on the draw, and rises to press her weight on her knees, giving her a slight advantage in height, as she’s still on the elevated hospital bed.

“What’s living if everything that made it worthwhile is lost to you?” She’s in his veins now, every beat of his heart pushes her words through Kylo’s limbs, makes them tense as regret turns to lead in his belly.

His mistakes, his choices, his behaviors are his. He’d been torn apart all his life and he doesn’t owe anyone any apologies for how he chose to keep himself whole.

Least of all this … Sith whelp.

“Dramatics don’t suit you.” Kylo hisses; he hadn’t been allowed to mourn the loss of his family, why should she? “You’re fine. Get up. Get dressed. I’ll show you to where you’ll be staying.” He hands her a bundle of black robes - they’d already been tailored to fit her frame, and Kylo shudders to think how Snoke had come by these details.

It’s easier this way. Don’t think, act. Don’t feel, obey.

He watches her out of his periphery, as her feet hit the floor (bare, a flat sound), but he turns away to preserve Rey’s … modesty? His cheeks are pink, it’s the overhead fluorescents and their garish monochrome lighting, surely the great Kylo Ren would not blush because a girl is undressing behind him.

There’s silence aside from the plip of some machine Rey’s still attached to, and the soft rustle of fabric as she dons the mantle of a knight. A knight of Ren, over which he presides as master.

A shiver, but his many layers of clothes prevent the chill from touching his skin. Rey has to be blameless, he can’t be affected by her without admitting the power she has over him. Snoke had seen it, otherwise, she would not be here to challenge him further.

Every breath she takes makes the force ripple, a stone cast into a once dark and placid lake, Kylo’s never had reason to question it until she broke the surface and light breached the blackest depths.

It’s absolutely maddening as silence continues to speak more to his weakness than words ever could, his strength.

Kylo snarls in the seconds before he storms out of her room. Rey doesn’t follow him immediately, but she does come searching after she’d fastened shut the unfamiliar tunic and cloak. Her hands are shaking, she shoves them in her deep pockets when Kylo’s caught staring.

He clears his throat, “you’ll get used to it.” The mantle of a warrior, he means, but the ambiguity and misguided compassion in the phrase could have been lent to many other things. Kylo doesn’t clarify further.

They march down the hall, side by side, it could be called companionable if Kylo wasn’t glowering at the polished floor and Rey didn’t look like his hostage. They’re both formidable, in matching mantles of black -- a small dispatch of Stormtroopers heads down the same hall, from the opposite direction and they part like a frightened, pale sea so the two insidious shadows could pass through without stopping.

A growl of malcontent, they're not used to seeing Kylo Ren unmasked and he can’t help but feel boyish, exposed, and by extension, _defensive_. Two troopers flinch, hands wrapped tight enough around their blasters that the joint in their armored vambraces expose the black mesh underneath.

“What did they ever do to you?” Rey chides, watching this unfold with her brows inching higher and higher. She’s unimpressed.

Kylo huffs out noncommittally but doesn’t directly answer her -- which is, of course, answer enough.

They’re nearing the bulk of apartments for all high ranking officers, and the Knights of Ren -- offset from the main barracks that house The Supremacy’s impressively sized armies. These are personal quarters, refined and outfitted with luxuries custom to whoever lives in them. Rey looks at the glossy doors marked with titles and names, numbers too. Kylo imagines that her hovel back on Dathomir cannot hold a flame to what they’re exposing her to now.

When he stops, Rey does too, a mirror image belabored by her fixation on the dazzling lights and labyrinth of halls.

She walks directly into his shoulder, and Kylo steadies her with a palm to her chest. His cheeks definitely and inexcusably burn at that -- and when he turns to refocus, his dark hair shifts, and she’d be able to see that it spread to his ears.

“This is my room,” Kylo’s voice is thick, low, his throat has tightened up over it passively as he attempts to move through his nerves. “And yours is -- attached, only accessible through here--” His stoicism falters more with each passing second and Rey’s rage makes her freckles contrast against her flushed skin (once more they’re damned by similarities), he really shouldn’t be focused on how prettily anger suits her, but it’s better than succumbing to the weight of his ill-gotten embarrassment.

“It was Snoke who requested it,” Kylo amends, all in one breath so that Rey would not think he’d ask this of her unwarranted. 

Rey’s eyes are cinders where they’re set into her face and _oh_, she looks like she’s just this side of crying.

He doesn’t know what to do with it, his guilt. So he swallows it down like everything else, a kill switch for the compassion he can’t seem to rid himself of.

“You won’t be able to leave without me. It is to see if you are worth The Supreme Leader’s time, the cultivation of power such as yours, is not freely gained.” It’s rote, scripted, and doing very, very little to calm down the tempestuous sith-girl who is baring her teeth up at him.

Rey’s about to say something else when he interrupts her; either because he can tell whatever comes out of her mouth next would be on par would ‘treason’, or he can’t overcome this … nameless, ambiguous thread that pulls them tighter together, even as they fight stubbornly to remain as opposites, set apart.

Regardless, Kylo snags her by her wrist and drags her inside of the suite - ignoring how her fingernails bite into the thick leather of his gloves, ignoring the squelch of her shoes’ heels as she drags them against the floor. It’s all pointless, and Kylo isn’t in a good enough mood to unpack this unnecessarily strong-willed girl and the baggage that’s evidently, moving in with her.

_Fantastic_.

“You’ll need to change for your upcoming assessment. Clothes better suited for it are hanging from the front of the armoire -- wear them.” He does not wait for a reply, as there will undoubtedly be one, and stomps off to his own bedroom, leaving Rey wide-eyed and fuming.

***

Rey’s mind is going a hundred thousand miles a minute.

What’s Snoke’s game, having Rey sleep so close to his prized Knight? How’s she supposed to sleep at all, knowing Kylo Ren is less than a stone’s throw away? It’s a nervousness that Rey can’t quite place, refuses to name, and so she tucks it underneath her defensive ire. It’s far easier to navigate rage, after all, than whatever emotions she’s decidedly not feeling about her new living situation.

Not feeling anything, no pink in her cheeks (she looks away from the reflective surface), her heart is not racing ( no, no, that too is hate ), her hands do not shake (she occupies them with setting out the training outfit Kylo’s instructing her to wear).

It’s a mess, and she’s a mess, and Rey’s never felt more alone.

At the very least, the looks of the clothes she’s changing into are promising. A training tunic - made of a tight, but breathable fabric, with leggings to match and the shoes are fitted, with grips on the bottom meant to aid in gaining traction on the slick surface of training mats. And, of course, it’s all in black.

Desert dwellers prefer their clothing practical, loose; made to reflect the sun’s rays and allow the movement of air. The Supremacy is neither hot nor dry; and her arid disposition leaves her exposed, freckled skin prickled with gooseflesh, Rey rubs at it idly.

She’s not a desert dweller, she’s a Sith, and Dathomir’s climate had let her wear loose, black robes, true to the nature of the beast she is.

Rey gives herself a once over in the long, slender mirror set into the wall beside her door before leaving with only one thought motivating her now. If she’s in training clothes, it means she’s about to have the chance to kick Kylo Ren’s ass, and that’s worth smiling about.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lightsabers, feelings and Snoke, oh my!

Darth Maul had insisted that Rey only needed to remember two things in combat: don’t look away from your opponent at any point and  _ never  _ underestimate them. It’s easy to see something in the corner of your eye, a trick of the light or of the dark -- it doesn’t matter which, because any true combatant would have already used the momentary distraction to their advantage, which is why no one’s to be taken lightly.

  
  


The Force has a habit of making itself powerful inside of those who’d otherwise appear weak.

  
  


Which is why Qi’ra knew, despite Rey’s small stature and the emaciated state of her when she was found on Jakku so many moons ago, that she’d be a formidable Sith under Maul’s tutelage. Even if her heart bled for Rey’s plight, if she wasn’t what they were ultimately after, Rey would have led a short, miserable life on that backwater planet with only the shifting sands and bellyaches as company.

  
  


Generosity was the mask their selfishness wore. And Rey had been both too young, and too in need of the aid they offered to question it. 

  
  


They taught her many, many lessons over the years but this one stuck with her the deepest, the longest. 

  
  


There are no true friends when  _ everyone  _ in the galaxy has ulterior motives. That they’d rather work to their benefit than help those in need. The light side’s propaganda wove an ornate tapestry of kindness, acceptance, and understanding. But she knew, even then, when the sky bled orange and her saber turned red: a girl who lived under the light of a blistering sun, understood the solace darkness offered. 

  
  


Which is why Rey is eager to spar with Kylo, to see whether or not he’s got any bite behind that mechanical bark of his. 

  
***

  
  


She’s unsurprised to find him lurking outside her door; he’d probably just been standing there and listening in while she sorted through the wreckage of her life.  _ It’s fair enough _ , Rey thinks while arching a brow at him -- he’s forgone the mask.  _ Good _ . 

  
  


Rey wants to see the fear in his eyes when she kicks his kriffing ass. 

  
  


“Knightly robes suit you.” Kylo’s voice is dull, clinical. Not praise but a recognition of something that, somehow, proved him right. That just strengthens Rey’s frustrations. She huffs, fanning out a couple errant strands of hair that have fallen from the low bun she wore it in to spar. Rey doesn’t want to be a Knight, she doesn’t want to be subservient to Kylo Ren who, from everything he’s shown her, is no replacement for Darth Maul, who had been a true sith lord. And not this … puppet of the insidious monster in the throne room. 

  
  


Rey just shrugs her shoulders, uninterested in what Kylo has to say. “Are you going to give me my saber back? Or am I going to be hitting you with practice staves?” That’s all she cares about. Not the way his brown eyes are warm, tracking over her face in a manner that’s both curious and like he’s found all the answers he is looking for there. Nor the way he makes a sound near enough to a laugh that she has to bite the inside of her cheek because it’s only going to make her mad.

  
  


“Practice staves are for just that, practice. You don’t need more practice, do you? The way you handled yourself on Dathomir led me to believe you’ve spent your life in training. We’re using this,”  _ we _ , he says, like Snoke’s somehow a part of their strange, serrated relationship, “as a way to better understand where you are in that training. If you need more, we’ll go from there. For now I just want to see everything you’re capable of,” Kylo explains and Rey searches for a reason to be mad at him, either for intonation or implication, but she comes up empty-handed. 

  
  


She nods, stiff, eyes dropping to look at the smooth black floor, and she’s ashamed to find that her reflection, even distorted by the surface, looks as though she’s complicit in the flush to her cheeks, the bright shine in her normally igneous gaze. Great.  _ Fantastic _ . 

  
  


Blushing over nothing, yet again. 

  
  


“So you’ll give me back my saber then?” Rey asks again, bluntly, trailing after Kylo as he leads them out of the small hallway between her bedroom and the rest of his apartment. He stops in front of the door that would take them back out into the general population. 

“Yes, you’ll have your saber back for this exercise,” he says slowly, as if he’s explaining it to someone of lesser intelligence and that’s exactly what Rey needed to push aside her childish ache for belonging and ignite her rage. Her defiance. 

  
  


She tries to shove past him but Kylo’s quick, and a gloved hand wraps around Rey’s bicep to stop her, “--- let me  _ go _ ,” Rey grits out, trying to pull away but she’s immediately quieted when Kylo leans closer to speak, 

  
  


“I need you to listen to me, little acolyte.” Almost fond, but his lips are twisted into a snarl and it’s the first time since she met him that Rey’s been genuinely afraid of Kylo Ren. With his proximity, and voice continuing on in a whisper, “I am the only reason you are alive. No one aboard the Supremacy cares if you live or die. No one but me. You might not understand because you’ve lived a life sheltered under the care of someone who actually looked out for you, but Snoke, for all his wisdom, has little patience left. I took a risk in asking that he spare you. Do not make me regret it.” 

  
  


She isn’t afraid anymore but there’s something there just as powerful -- if not more so -- and when Kylo sees it in her eyes he takes a half step back, straightening his posture before he reaches past her to let Rey out into the hall, following after. 

  
  


The Force is pulsing with tension, and Rey can only think that the fact they’re going to spar is the best possible outlet for it.

  
  


Neither of them speaks during the walk to the training rooms. It could have only been a dozen or so minutes that passed between then and now and yet the discomfort and… whatever else is snapping and crackling between them, makes it feel like it had been hours instead. 

  
  


Rey exhales in relief as soon as they enter the expansive room. It’s hexagonal, with the widest wall facing outward; a viewport of thick transparisteel showcases the brilliant expanse of stars all around them. When she was little, she thought of them as her friends, how plentiful they’d be so that she couldn’t ever possibly feel alone; funny how now, when she’s close enough to touch them, Rey’s made aware of the millions of miles in between every one of them. Each pinprick of light was just as lonely as she was, and is.

  
  


Being on your own doesn’t leave room for people to hurt you. No margin for errors when you’re the only one making mistakes. No one to let in, no one to cut back out. It’s easier, right? It has to be easier than what she’d seen of Qi’ra and Maul. Of what her birth parents had ultimately decided to do with her. 

  
  


But she’s not alone, she’s stuck on the First Order flagship with a Vader lookalike she can’t make heads or tails of. 

  
  


Rey’s brought back into focus by a loud  _ thwack _ , and by her legs being swept out from underneath her -- luckily, in training with a Sith Lord, you’re taught to expect the unexpected so she’s already thrown her arm out to brace herself and wheels her legs around until she’s flipped back upright and  _ seething  _ at the smug look on Kylo’s face.    
  
  
“What are you---” she exclaims, cheeks red but there’s no time to finish because Kylo’s thrown the wooden staff to the wayside and has called, ignited, and began swinging his ragged saber like a mad man, with no clear form and no visible function. 

  
  


“You said you’d give me mine back,” she barks over the crackle of his weapon, dodging it to the best of her ability. “This isn’t exactly a fair assessment ---” Rey spots the long black hilt of her saber staff on the same table his had been on and her eyes lock with Kylo’s in the moment before she draws it to herself. One half of it sputters out and clashes with his, and then the other. She pirouettes to shift into a defensive stance, leg lifted so that it connects with his chest.  _ Hard _ . Sending all ten feet of him hurtling backward. His dark hair has fallen over his face, not yet matted with sweat, but if Rey has any choice in the matter, it’ll be dripping with that or blood by the end. 

  
  


Kylo’s smiling, until he’s  _ laughing _ , using his free hand to push his hair out of his eyes, looking at Rey with an undeniable thread of amusement -- like he’s enjoying the fact that she’s an actual challenge to fight. 

  
  


“Snoke was right,” Kylo taunts, twirling his lightsaber with a dramatic flourish and the air burns between them, “You’re stronger than you  _ look _ .” 

  
  


That just pisses Rey off, as he likely intended it to. 

  
  


“I shouldn’t be surprised that a puppet agrees with the monster pulling its strings.” Rey’s annoyed; Kylo had oscillated between claiming that he alone had protected her from Snoke’s wrath and using the threat of it as bait. That makes her wary about whether or not she can trust his intentions at all -- not that she entertained the idea that she  _ could  _ trust Kylo, but it would be nice if she didn’t feel the need to watch her back every second of every day. She stalks towards him, the odd texture of her shoes gripping the mats beneath them as intended, even while sweat starts to fleck the spongy material as their combat grows more and more intense. 

  
  


She’s small, lithe, and a half-step ahead of Kylo’s footwork, but he’s strong.  _ Strong  _ strong. Every time the bulk of his saber comes crashing down against one of her own blades, it hurts. Jarring the bones in her arms all the way up to her clenched teeth. But she’s resilient in that she won’t give up no matter how hard he hits, or how long this battle spans. Kylo Ren will soon learn the stubbornness of Rey. 

  
  


And that things that don’t bend, break. 

  
  


Kylo is relentless. He grunts, snarls, pushing her back towards any of the walls but Rey fights on, slips under him, through the gap in his brutish posturing and ends up nearly killing him a time or two when spinning the saber staff in an arc. It’s clear he’s never fought against a weapon like hers before, and there’s  _ awe  _ where the red light shines in his eyes. It makes something unholy flutter in Rey’s gut but it’s tamped down as soon as he shakes his head and resumes fighting. 

  
  


What’s he trying to prove? And to who? 

  
  


Saber against saber; there’s no real goal here, no end in sight. They fight and they fight and Rey’s not sure if this is an evaluation at all. He doesn’t go for the kill, and so neither does she, but they aren’t holding back anything else. There are elbows to the face, knees to the thigh, as much kicking and hitting as there is actual weapons-based combat. She’s got a split lip, a bruise blossoming yellow on her cheek and she’s pretty sure there’s a broken rib underneath her tunic. 

  
  


Kylo’s just as worse for wear; a black eye, a bruise on his chest from when she’d shoved him back earlier, and he’s strongly favoring his right leg. She doesn’t feel sorry for him, or for any of it, because he’s more than earned an ass beating as far as she can tell. 

  
  
  


The way Kylo holds himself, well; it’s almost like he agrees. 

  
  


One more fifteen minute bought and then Kylo barks out, “stop!” Just as the light of her saber illuminates the hollow of Kylo’s throat. Paints it in streaks of red, a preview of what would happen if she bridged the gap. If she took a step forward and cut his neck.  _ She could do it _ \--- there’s a voice eating away at the back of her mind. Acidic. All but begging for her to end Kylo’s suffering.

  
  


_ What suffering?  _

  
  


Rey blinks, startled, and extinguishes both blades of her saber while looking at him in wide-eyed confusion. She’s not sure why he’d told her to stop. Even less sure why she chose to obey. 

  
  


“We’re done for the day,” Kylo’s weapon is clipped to the holster on his thigh, and Rey’s caught up in watching the way he conducts himself. He’s gone from this bastion of power, high above her, to a man who has been cowed so completely by a yet unseen force. 

  
  


Had he heard it too? 

  
  


“Kylo---” Rey tries to interject while he gathers their things from the various places they’d been flung around the training room. Undoing a bit of the chaos they’d let loose in the most intense hour of her life. Not even sparring with Darth Maul could compare to this. He held back. Protective of Rey even as he pledged himself to die by her blade; such was the way of the Sith. The rule of the two. 

  
  


Kylo had made her fight for it. She scrambled for her footing. Fought with every fiber of her being. There hadn’t been a single second that she wasn’t focused on Kylo, matching his swings, finding her footing around him while also giving his reach a considerable berth. She felt like a livewire at all times, the force was drawn so tight between them two that it might as well have been ready to break. No one had ever made Rey feel so alive. 

  
  


He’s ignoring her, now. And the high of combat is wearing off. She re-ties her hair into a bun; more of a practical one, than the kind she’d worn for their training, and fans at the back of her neck in an effort to dry some of the sweat.

  
  


And to have something to do with herself other than stand there like an asshole, trembling. 

  
  


She can feel the ache of her muscles now, the sting of her injuries warring to take up the most mental real estate in how she’ll handle it going forward. Whether or not she can handle it at all. Rey has always presented herself as an unquestioningly tough, spitfire of a girl; but that’s how she had to be. The weak don’t survive the kinds of things she’s gone through. 

  
  


At her core, though. At her core, Rey’s still a girl who desperately wants to belong someplace, and to someone. It’s an infuriating reality, when she considers where she’s wound up, but it’s still the one she’s been handed.

  
  


“Kylo.” She tries again, slamming the door shut with a burst of frustrated force energy. He was trying to leave her here without instruction or explanation and she’s not about to let him. They’d fought well, they’d fought hard. Didn’t she meet his expectations? Isn’t she what someone would want of their apprentice to be? 

  
  


_ So lonely. At night --- desperate to sleep.  _

  
  


He finally turns to look at her and Rey understands all at once why he insists on wearing that mask of his. Everything he’s feeling is written as plain as daylight in his dark, sad eyes. The desperation within them matches her own and it answers two of her most pressing questions. 

  
  


Why had Kylo Ren spared her on Dathomir? 

  
  


And who that voice was, goading her on while they fought just now.

  
  


Snoke had honed Kylo Ren into an obedient weapon. Named him Darth Vader’s heir and used that as a way to leverage better options. Another darkling child to twist and train. Manipulative, evil reptile of a man. 

  
  


Rey’s strength  _ frightens  _ Kylo, because it poses a very real threat to his standing with the Supreme Leader. She sees this, all of it, in the brief glimpse of his umber eyes. It makes her stomach turn, and the hand that reflexively reached for him, after shutting the door, fall back to her side as it curls into a tense fist. She’s not out here to replace him as Snoke’s right hand, and the fact that Snoke would just as soon as have her in chains ---- 

  
  


There’s a rush of wind, a strange sensation considering the fact that they’re aboard a First Order flagship in the middle of outer rim space, but it’s enough to ruffle the ends of his hair. Rey feels it just as Kylo does too, and they’re both standing in this loud, frightening silence without a clue as to what’s just happened or why they both seem to be able to feel it, at the same time. 

  
  


Rey shivers and ducks her head before following Kylo back towards their rooms. They’re both filthy, wounded, and rattled from the day’s experiences and it makes sense that he’d wordlessly leave her for the bathroom across the hall from her room. A hiss of a sonic shower turning on is explanation enough. Rey understands. She goes to do the same for herself in a smaller room adjacent to her own. It’s got a toilet and a sonic and not much space for anything else, but it’ll do.

  
  


She scrubs herself clean; rubbing this strange rock salt type soap across her skin until it’s raw, and pink. Normally, whenever Rey bathed, she took the time to revel in the flow of water, running through the natural dips and curves of her body; the desert lives deeply inside of her and the appreciation for a resource as scarce as this… it’s not something she could let go so easily. It was more than that for her on Dathomir, though. Flashes of the red planet pass behind her eyes as she lets the sonic’s spray work out the knots between her shoulder blades.

  
  


There, she’d learned that water is as much a function of the Force as the air they breathe. The ground beneath their feet or the nascent glow of the sky above. 

  
  


It’s not real water, in a sonic, but the sensation is close enough that Rey  _ tries  _ to let go. To give in to the passion of the dark flower, a perennial bloom inside of her, and to just breathe. She’s not a particularly sensory girl, by way of touch at least, but that doesn't mean she’s completely unaware of the draw. 

  
  


Her fingers ride the ridge of a particularly nasty bruise on her ribcage, count the notches between each rib of the ribs beneath while walking her hand down until she’s cleaning the thatch of tawny pubic hair sitting at the crest of her thighs. A shiver runs up her spine then as she lets her hand linger, using the other to take the soap and set it back onto the shelf where she’d found it. 

  
  


Rey’s eyes shut, and she braces her elbow against the corner of the shower so she wouldn’t slip and fall while attempting to give herself some kind of relief. 

  
  


Because that nameless tension does have a name -- just hard to hear, when she’s spent her life cloaked in fifteen kinds of denial.  _ All she can think about _ ; smoothing her hand down her belly and back up, cupping one of her breasts -- all she can think about, but they’re not her thoughts, when the calloused tip of her thumb of her free hand presses back the hood of skin covering her clit. Her breath hitches, body tense, warm starts to spread through her that has nothing to do with with the sonic that’s long gone cold. 

  
  


Her eyes continue to flutter, so she tries to keep them closed, biting her lower lip until it bleeds. Keeping herself quiet’s the challenge. The last thing she needs is to alert the entire crew of the Supremacy that she’s incredibly pent up and seeking a way to vent her frustrations. The frustrations that Kylo Ren fills her with. 

  
  


She doesn’t even  _ like  _ him. He’s stubborn, callous, and rude. It doesn’t matter that his lips are plush, red, or that his eyes are dark and clear enough that she can see herself in them -- might even drown if he kept on staring in that way he reserves for looking at her, or if he spoke words in a low baritone at her ear; she can almost hear them, voice like velvet.  _ Don’t be afraid, I feel it too. _ Echoing through her while one finger slips inside of her, and a second is eager to join it, her hands are shaking but it has nothing to do with exhaustion. Not anymore. 

  
  


This is hardly her first masturbatory foray, but it is the only time she’s felt the urge after sparring. Her normal habits were to eat, and then to sleep; this is an appetite she’s grossly underestimated, and it leaves Rey feeling frenzied in her efforts to satiate it. 

  
  


She moans through her teeth, throwing her head back and ignoring when it collides with the wall behind her. Her breath goes staccato as two fingers turn to three and she bows forward over the rush of pleasure that comes as a preamble, calves aching from the way her toes continue to curl into the tile beneath her. 

  
  


There’s a duel sensation that she’s only just become aware of. Twin suns burning brightly alongside her mounting bliss, one distant, and one near. One that’s hers and one that belongs to someone else but she can’t dedicate any real brainpower to investigating who; Rey’s right on the edge, toeing that thin line and she’s pumping her wrist hard enough that it almost hurts but the distinction between pleasure and pain hardly matters to a Sith. Someone meant to feed off of that hurt and channel into power.

  
  


Rey’s climax isn’t the usual slow-burning goodness that unfurls through her belly, and then her limbs. This hits her like a flashfire, hot, heavy, all-consuming; it isn’t gentle, it’s violent and it is ripped out of her hard enough that Rey almost falls, grateful for her foresight in wedging herself into this corner so that she couldn’t. It’s the single most intense orgasm of her life and she can’t even catch her breath long enough to process it or attempt to take stock of her surroundings. 

  
  


The film over her sight eventually fades away, and the bathroom comes back into focus. Rey turns the sonic off, hands fumbling over the nozzles and buttons but she eventually shuts it all down, heading back into her room on coltish legs. 

  
  


She can feel her stomach gnawing, though. After sparring as hard as she and Kylo had it makes sense that she has worked up an appetite. And after that shower, even more so. Rey makes a face, runs a comb through her clean hair and decides to just pull on a new set of those training mesh leggings and a black chest-wrap. Every article of clothing here is black, aside from the gunmetal detailings and clasps. Fitting.    
  
  
Rey’s …  _ cautious _ , in exiting her room. Not sure what kind of mood Kylo will be in, but unwilling to let it bring hers down. She’s feeling pretty good right about now, and his royal sourness doesn’t get a free pass just because Snoke is a creep who doesn’t acknowledge or respect boundaries, mental, physical, or otherwise. 

  
  


That’s when a nagging thought pipes up, saying something about Snoke being in her mind too, seeing potential in her bloodline, as he had in Kylo’s. The last of the Skywalkers, and… Rey. Rey nothing. Rey no one. Rey, who was so caught up in these existential thoughts -- and fielding worry that the Supreme Leader knew she just rubbed one out -- that she doesn’t realize Kylo’s already in the kitchenette offset from the living area, and walks face-first into him.

  
  


Into his chest. 

  
  


His  _ bare  _ chest.

  
  


He smells like something smoldering, far away smoke and ozone from a lightsaber left too long burning. Rey is effectively dazed by this collision and it isn’t until Kylo’s hands grip her by the bare shoulders and move her back a step or two, that she realizes she’d just been standing there, all but plastered against his pecs. 

  
  


Now her cheeks are burning and she could just about die. 

  
  


He’s only in a pair of soft black pants that look like they’re meant for sleep, and there’s something indescribable in the way that he’s drinking her in. Kylo tilts his head to one side, looks her up and down conspicuously, slowly, 

  
  


“Did you have a nice shower?” And then that bastard has the audacity to  _ grin _ . 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some big ol' plot points are being set up - can any of y'all guess what might happen? Or what this chapter is alluding to?


End file.
